Nutanix has taken another shot at VMware, this time with a virtual machine migration tool that takes VMs from ESXi to its own Acropolis hypervisor.
Changing a VM's format is not rocket science, because VMs are described by metadata. Nutanix reckons “Xtract for VMs” therefore goes beyond the basics, “by automatically injecting …

Updates to commercial hypervisors are like buses: none for ages and then two come along at once!
How else can we explain that late last week XenServer 7.1 and ESXi 6.0 Update 3 both landed late last week?
Citrix first, because while XenServer 7.1 sounds like nothing notable it is in fact the company's first ever Long Term …

Intel's decided it can do without VMware's ESXi hypervisor as part of a big upgrade of its private cloud.
Chipzilla's a Platinum Member of the OpenStack Foundation and therefore has a seat on the project's board. The company's also been building an OpenStack private cloud since around 2011, but built a customised …

Virtual SAN storage and data management software supplier DataCore thinks it has the answer to slow IO problems in virtualised multi-core servers – put the cores to work.
DataCore reckons this sorts out a general virtualised, multi-core server IO problem and not just a storage one.
It claims hypervisors, operating systems and …

VMware is urging users of its vCenter Server and ESXi software to install its latest patches to plug vulnerabilities that can allow remote-code execution and denial of service.
The vCenter flaw was first spotted by Doug McLeod of Edinburgh-based security consultancy 7 Elements toward the beginning of the year, and the …

VMware has found, and is trying hard to fix, a nasty bug in ESXi 6.0.
Issue 2124669, causes “ESXi 6.0 host network connectivity' to be “lost randomly.”
Once the connectivity is lost, “ESXi enters into a non-responding state and becomes unmanageable until reboot.”
Forget about re-connecting to networks until you reboot, but …

Sysadmin blog
Ravello is launching two new products today: InfinityDC and Inception SX. Both technologies allow VMware environments to be run on top of Amazon's AWS or Google's Compute cloud. Though the technologies have been undergoing fairly public testing for some time, this marks the official launch of commercially supported products. …

VMware has recalled a recent patch because that sees virtual machines using VMware NSX for vSphere 6.x or Cisco Nexus 1000v unable to communicate across their hosts.
That's a jolly bad thing for all manner of reasons, so VMware says it has “removed the Patch Release ESXi550-201504002 from the Download Repository and is working …

Linux kernel developer Christoph Hellwig has sued VMware in Hamburg, Germany, over alleged violations of the GNU General Public License.
Hellwig's suit, which is backed by New York-based advocacy group the Software Freedom Conservancy, alleges that VMware's proprietary ESXi hypervisor products use portions of the code that …

VMware has emitted a small update to ESXi that, among other things, adds support for the Mac Pro.
ESXi 5.5 patch 3 offers a collection of updates that address security and stability issues.
VMware's not mentioning it on the download page, but staffer William Lam has helpfully let us know that the update also means ESXi can …

Storagebod
In the opinion of this blogger, VMware needs to open-source ESXi and move on. By open-sourcing ESXi, it could start to concentrate on becoming the dominant player in the future delivery of the third platform.
If the EMC subsidiary continues with the current development model with ESXi, its interactions with the OpenStack …

VMware hypervisor-caching software startup PernixData is gorging on cash from VCs as it ramps up development and its go-to-market efforts.
PernixData's FVP product transparently virtualises server flash and RAM as an ESXi cache across multiple servers to enable scale-out storage performance and accelerate applications in …

VMworld 2013
Server virtualization juggernaut VMware has been talking about the software-defined data center (SSDC) for so long that you have to stop and remember that all of the software that enables this strategy is not actually available. But at VMworld 2013 this week in San Francisco, Virtzilla will be rolling out some major pieces of …

Business is booming at HyTrust, a maker of policy management and access control software for VMware virtual infrastructure, and whistleblower system admin Edward Snowden, who revealed the National Security Agency's web-spying PRISM project, is doing his inadvertent part to pump it up even further.
"The Snowden breach at the …

The SuperVisor control freak that lets VMware vCenter to do unnatural things to non-VMware hypervisors and clouds is getting a 2.0 rev with a bunch of new features. This update comes just as HotLink, the company behind the tool, has decided to make it up in volume and provide a full and freebie version of SuperVisor that we can …

In some ways, server virtualization makes disaster recovery easier, less costly, and more approachable for a wider range of companies. And in others, it makes disaster recovery more important than ever because more virtual server eggs are running in a single physical server basket. No matter which way server virtualization cuts …

Convirture, one of the early entrants to put out virtualization and cloud management tools, has finally done what it has needed to do for years to break into the big-time with enterprises: Support VMware's ESXi hypervisor with its ConVirt control freak.
A cynic would say that this is when VMware will swoop in to buy Convirture …

Hadoop World
VMware wants every workload to be virtualized, even high performance computing, data warehousing, and Hadoop data munching workloads. The server virtualization juggernaut will get around to HPC and data warehousing at some point, but it already has a start on Hadoop with Project Serengeti. That project got some tweaks this week …